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Dr. Matt A. Connell, MBA is an author, educator, and entrepreneur who has spent his career building economic and academic opportunity for non-traditional learners and underserved communities, and is the author of Learning Outside the Lines, a memoir and systems argument for why opportunity is a matter of design, not luck.

Dr. Matt A. Connell, MBA is an author, educator, and entrepreneur whose life's work is building economic and academic opportunity for non-traditional learners and underserved communities. He is the founder of IEMF™ (Inclusive Economic Mobility Framework™), a system for turning untapped talent into economic opportunity, and the author of the forthcoming book Learning Outside the Lines (November 2026), which explores how talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not — and how opportunity itself is a design choice. Over the course of his career, Dr. Connell has run undergraduate business programs at two universities and led initiatives in workforce development and special education, including justice-impacted entrepreneurship programs that gave people written off by the system a real path forward. He has also spent a lifetime building and running his own ventures, including as Co-Founder/CEO of Yellowbrick.me and previously as Chief Operating Officer of a national wellness company. He has helped hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs — including justice-involved individuals and first-generation students — start and grow their own businesses. Dr. Connell holds a special education degree from the University of Saint Joseph, an MBA from the University of Connecticut, and a doctorate from the University of Hartford, and has spent his career designing programs that meet people where they are.

Growing up in West Hartford, Connecticut, Matt Connell was — by most institutional measures — a problem. Two arrests before he was sixteen. A record. A reputation. A trajectory that looked, from the outside, like a closed door.

What the institutions missed was what they always miss: the talent was there. The curiosity, the drive, the capacity to build something — all of it was present. What was absent was an environment designed to activate it. So Matt built that environment. For two decades. For hundreds of people who looked exactly like he did at sixteen.

He taught in Hartford public schools, placing himself in an honors English classroom despite severe dyslexia — and quickly found himself co-teaching with five subject-matter experts because the students needed more than one person could give them. Ever since, his work has centered on building economic and academic opportunity for non-traditional learners and underserved communities — including justice-impacted entrepreneurship programs at Goodwin University and the University of Bridgeport that raised over $1.5 million in competitive grants, graduated 172 of 180 enrollees, launched more than 100 businesses, and produced a two-year recidivism rate of approximately 2% against a national baseline of approximately 44%. He developed the Inclusive Economic Mobility Framework™ — a five-phase curriculum that combines entrepreneurship education, mentoring, and structured capital access into a single pathway.

He is now an advisor to Key Connections and the author of Learning Outside the Lines — a memoir and systems argument for why opportunity is not a matter of luck, but of design.

His work has been recognized by the Connecticut Department of Corrections, the National Association of Community College Entrepreneurship, and the funders and institutions that have watched program graduates do what everyone said couldn't be done.